Sciral Consistency: Track Fuzzy Interval Tasks

It lets you track tasks that need to be done on a regular basis, such as watering plants, changing kitty litter, or washing your car. While Entourage (and, I assume, Outlook) can do something similar with interval-based events, Consistency adds the novel ability to set a range of days over which a task can be completed. So, for example, you might want to change your water filter every 30-60 days or rake the front yard every 5-9 days. Consistency presents your tasks in a scannable Excel-like grid that makes it simple to see which items are in the current “do” range.

It also looks useful as a way to track your progress toward a goal—you can quickly see how close you are to your plan of hitting the gym three times a week or calling Grandma twice a month. It also would be handy for Getting Things Done nerds who want to pull repeating items from their hard landscape calendar and get them onto a list where they can be reviewed and completed in context.

I do wish this were just an integrated function of full-on PIMs or even that Consistency had a basic alarm functionality. As is, the price is just a skosh high for me, but it does provide a clever solution for a fuzzy problem.

Sciral Consistency [Download]. OSX & Windows. $25.00. “The unregistered version is fully featured, but has a few limits to encourage you to register if you like it.”

I'm a GTD newbie. I bought the book about 1 month ago (after reading about it here on 43folders). I have started using the techniques touted by David Allen and am quite happy with the results.

The ‘Repeating Task’ (ie. exercise, status report, etc.) is a topic that I've had trouble wrapping my mind around. How have you GTD masters integrated repeating tasks into your systems. Do you just leave these types of tasks indefinitely on your lists or your calendar? I'm concerned that using this approach will introduce noise items into my system. The status of these types of items will never change (ie. they will always be on the lists or in the calendar). I fear the unchanging, unmoving nature of these items will cause me to ignore them to some extent. This produces noise and any noise in the system reduces its effectiveness. Sciral Consistency sounds like a nice alternative but is using 2 calendars an effective route? I’d love to hear how you workflow gurus handle this.

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